Son Desires Baseball, Not Bullets

This is the third in an occasional series of columns written by a thirtysomething father trying to make sense of raising two young children in Los Angeles.

Dear Skeeter,

You’ll be happy to know that, in the spirit of glasnost, Eric won’t be getting any war toys this year. This is not a matter of principle. Eric hasn’t asked for any. Last year, if you remember, he had his heart set on GI Joe’s “Rolling Thunder,” three feet of death incarnate, complete with MIRV’d ICBMs. I’d always felt war toys were a reasonably harmless way to work out aggressions, but even I drew the line at nuclear missiles. Or so I thought, until I found myself coming home from Toys R Us with my own home delivery system. I told myself they were conventional warheads.

Leni, you’ll be happy to know, washed her hands of it. Fine by me. This was boy stuff, I said. She reminded me her brother John works for Council for a Livable World, lobbying for a nuclear-free America. I couldn’t even have a nuclear-free household.

But so what. Eric glowed and bubbled. He’d achieved his heart’s desire, one full yard of total destruction. But to my surprise, he didn’t much want to wage war with it. I nudged him into having a couple of battles--he’d take the cream of his warriors and leave me the dregs and castoffs to fight him with, the broken ones or the cheap imitations. The battle was a one-sided slaughter, but, even then, he didn’t like losing any men. The whole encounter was a series of timeouts while he rearranged his men.

For Ariel, of course, nuclear weapons are not a holiday issue. Her idea of a good time is playing tea party, or playing mom. She knows how to use her dolls; timeouts are not what her games are about. She’ll go on for 20 minutes at a stretch play-cooking or play-feeding and play-disciplining her wayward children. If play is practicing for the real world, she’s a past master.

Is her preference for make-believe homemaking nature or nurture? She’s my princess and all that, but when I sit and let her feed me plastic cookies, I feel less like I’m pushing her into this than like I’m being sucked in against my will. She has a much better sense of what being a girl is than I do. I’m along for the ride.

Buying presents has been tough this year. They haven’t been hounding us much, so we don’t know what they really need. (I suppose need is the right word.) Ariel considers clothes presents, up to a point. Clothes for her dolls count of course, and, at almost 5, she is on the cusp of Barbie-hood with its endless requirements of Barbie-condos and Ferraris and Jacuzzis, but it’s still all very tentative. Eric has a pet Nintendo game he wants, but there’s no real desperation behind his plea.

So we’ve got sort of a free ride this year. You too. But Eric has made one request, which it’s my job to honor: he wants me to get him a $12 baseball card, any $12 baseball card. I know, you’ll think it’s outrageous--what’s a 7-year-old need a $12 baseball card for--but I’m doing it. See, I feel responsible for hooking him on cards.

He got the itch from his friend Adam, but I scratched it. Watching him suck up those statistics was so exciting. He doesn’t know what a percentage is, of course, but he knows who has the highest ones, and I prodded him into making up his own all-star teams. He goes for players with the biggest lifetime numbers, which is gratifying for me, since they’re all the old-timers. Nolan Ryan is his prize card. He’s told me he wants to beat Hank Aaron’s record for homers when he grows up. I told him I’d be in the stands cheering when he did.

I didn’t just prod. What I did was buy my own cards and trade with him. Partly this was to compensate for my feeble attempts at card collecting when I was a kid, but I told myself I had a good, sound reason--I was teaching him the meaning of a deal. I’d be fair but firm. And trying to make an even deal became as much of a game for Eric as trying to find the strikeout leader. The sides had to balance. With any marginal difference on his side, maybe.

We had a lot of fun at this, and Eric has spent more time with his baseball cards than just about anything he’s got. I wonder, though, if I’ve been doing well by him. When he gets to trading with his friends, I’m afraid I’ve set him up to be a sucker. If I was getting him ready for the real world, shouldn’t I have really skinned him once or twice? Then he’d know what to look out for. But maybe he’s better off learning that from his friends.

All the trading was kind of pointless, too. When I was a kid you had to trade to get what you wanted. Now marketing has triumphed. Want just the Dodgers? You can buy them all for a couple of bucks. Want the All Stars? They’re packaged too. You can even send in $15 and buy the whole kit and kaboodle. Where is the glory? Where’s the pleasure in cheating the fates? We’ve been given so much choice that we don’t have the chance to want something we can’t get.

But Eric hasn’t been beating on me for the full set. He wants that $12 card, he says, because he wants a special card and he figures $12 is a lot of money but not too much. In other words, it’s what he thinks I’ll spring for. I’ve got to admit he’s figured it damn close. So I got him a Topps 1966 Don Sutton (not ‘65, that would be his much more valuable rookie year) to go with the 1988 Don Sutton he traded me for. Side by side they’re something to see. Kind of my own life in a Topps mirror.

So it’s baseballs not bullets this year. This morning, as I helped Eric strap himself into his shoes, I realized we hadn’t talked once about what was going on in Eastern Europe. So I tried to tell Eric about the Berlin Wall, and the Cold War, and he asked me earnestly what a Communist was; he listened to my explanation, attentive but not completely engaged, as if he were listening to something which didn’t really involve him. And I realized that with luck he would be right, it wouldn’t involve him. I told him to remember that Wall, that he was alive when it was torn down. And maybe this year, if there isn’t any more peace on Earth, at least there’s more good will towards men.

So you can tell John that his sister Leni promises him that 1990 will find us a nuclear-free household.

Ever your loving son-in-law, Jon